ITU Workshop

I would like to talk about our lectures and sharing with undergraduate and graduate students from different semesters in ITU Architecture Department.

As a structural design engineer, I started these lectures considering the benefits they might provide to architecture and structural engineering fields as well as to students’ future.

Currently, I attend as a fore and final jury to the Form and Structure lectures of Hakan Tong and Hülya Arı. In these lectures, students prepare structure forms with a plastic bottle and wooden sticks where my purpose is to evaluate and comment on these structural forms from a structural designer point of view. The comments that I brought in to the discussions as a structural designer, are aimed to provide consciousness and focus to think about the nature of materials and structure.

Besides model evaluations, there is another lecture where I explain and evaluate the built structures that are in our expertise, in Oğuz Cem Çelik’s English Graduate and Erasmus programs. In these evaluations the focus is generated on the relationship between architects and structural engineers in real life.

The purpose of these lectures is to impose on design related consciousness to these young architects so that they cooperate with structural engineers in order to create structures appropriate to its materials nature and with forms developed from its flow of forces throughout their careers.

In lectures that I provide presentations are focused and specialized on supportive wooden structures, structure systems, connection types and the usage of supportive industrial wooden materials in architecture, are designed to be the major lecture materials.

Written by Author

Ahmet Topbaş"Founder and Director at ATEKNIK. After his undergraduate study at Istanbul Technical Univesity as a structural engineer, he studied MBA at Georgia State and obtained his MSc in Structural Engineering at Columbia University of NYC. Half of his 22-year engineering experience has taken place in the USA, and he holds a P.E., Professional Engineering license. He teaches at engineering and architecture schools in Istanbul part time as a visiting lecturer. He is passionate about Learning, Swimming, Travel, Music, and Cinema. He plans to do more of Snowboarding and many other things after his kids grow up a bit more."